Show BROADWAY AND MAIN STREET Professional Blind Man Plays Gag to the Very Finish By BILLY ROSE Last in a mood for malt and I stopped in to chin with Sammy proprietor of the Bowery Follies and honorary mayor of that unwashed neck of the Manhattan woods new and gruesome in your I asked mine said that Faker Kennedy died last week and his eyes to a bartender down the I to the Faker was a professional blind man who had been rattling a tin cup on the Bowery for as long as he could In spite of his It was a standing joke around the flophouses that the could shoot off a bug's ear at a hundred used to kid Kennedy about his said he f JA never let on it was 1 lag an act if it was an fl And we were JK sure because ad no one ever saw the oM coot without his smoked Gar- Billy Rose gan's Bar lere the Faker used to hang out after Sammy proprietor had a kind of running g ig at the bum's you he used to me your Mine are get pretty tired from at the leave to was the Faker's stock they'll come In handy if ya ever want to play a a a about how the talk went until one night not long ago when a couple of walked Into Gargan's and lined the customers up against the wall all except the Faker who didn't budge from his usual place at the end of the the punks had cleaned out the register what little was In the customers' one of them walked up to the Faker and Jabbed a gun In his wouldn't take pennies from a blind would K i that mid guys got a roll on Faker made out as If he was fumbling in his and then suddenly made a grab for the yanked it away from the nood and bopped him over the head with using the body as a sort of he pointed the gun at the other yer he I'll shoot the cigar yer it so happened the thug did have a cigar In his and when he heard the blind man's on-the-button reference to It hi got panicky and dropped his A dozen guys jumped and a few minutes later he and his pal were in the precinct a a a of everybody on the Bowery was sure the Faker was a but he never owned up got me all he once told The stick-up guy was an Italian stogie and ya can smell them things a block away And I guessed It was In his mouth by the way he couple of weeks Sammy Kennedy got and the day after bis body was carted off to Potter's Field a packet up in Gargan's nurl with a pair of glass like the old man was telling the truth after I said Is one way or the said the Mayor of the the eyes came out of the Faker's and then again maybe he picked them up In t You you never can tell about these cuckoos he might have wanted to play the gag out to th |